High court gives CRPF job to man who ‘shrunk’

A fat person might slim down and vice-versa. But ever heard of someone’s variable height?

Yes. Delhi High Court has proved it can happen and asked the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) to appoint a 25-year-old man denied a job as he “failed” his height test by a centimetre.

Navneet Tiwari, a resident of Nangloi, was 170.60 cm tall in 2007 when he applied for a job with the CRPF. Having met all other criteria, an appointment letter was issued to him. But a week before he was to join, Tiwari received a letter saying he measured just 169 cm at the recruitment test, 1 cm short of the eligibility rule.

Tiwari got his height checked again at a government hospital and it read 170 cm. A further test a hospital within the court complex on orders of the judges showed 171 cm. As per medical science, a person grows in height only till the age of 22.

Delving into medical studies, the judges found four different heights was not surprising as the height of a person is maximum when he gets up in the morning and it compresses by a few millimetres as the day passes. It is at its minimum when someone goes to sleep. The court said it was to be noted that the CRPF had measured Tiwari’s height between 4 and 5 pm.

Hope for many?

The bench headed by Justice Pradeep Nandrajog asked the Centre to specify some height variation from now on while inviting applications for jobs, mostly in defence services. The order is significant as it could open floodgates of litigation by those denied jobs for falling short by a few millimetres.

“The reason is obvious. All candidates are not measured simultaneously and at the same time when recruitment process is on,” the court said.

The judges task was made easier by Tiwari’s counsel RK Saini who drew its attention to relief given by the court in 2007 and 2008 to two such aspirants.